With the on-going development of communication techniques, there is an increasing number of types of services born by communication equipments. In order to decrease the quality risk in, and dependence on, equipments provided by a single equipment manufacturer, an operator tends to choose multiple equipment manufacturers, leading to hybrid networking of multiple types of equipments in one network. Meanwhile, there are services spanning different types of equipments and equipments of different manufacturers, which further complicates network management.
Sometimes, an end-to-end service established by an operator inevitably has to span different types of equipments of multiple equipment manufacturers, or even go across a network of another operator (i.e., a third-party operator network). As there is an increasingly higher customer requirement on quality of service in a network provided by an operator, the operator is required accordingly to manage the network so as to ensure quality of an end-to-end service. That is to say, both an end-to-end service to pass through different types of equipments of multiple equipment manufacturers and an end-to-end service to pass through a third-party operator network require transparent end-to-end management. In this case, a method for network management has to be proposed to solve the problems currently encountered in network management in an efficient, direct and reliable way.
At present, a direct network management method for an end-to-end service, capable of integrating equipments of multiple manufacturers and networks of multiple operators, is yet to be disclosed in related art. In managing equipments of multiple manufacturers by an existing network-level management system, a network under the management of the system has to be managed by a same operator without traversing an equipment of an unknown manufacturer or a third-party operator network. In related art, generally, when a service is to pass though an equipment of an unknown manufacturer or a third-party operator network, the service is first managed as a service segment nonterminal at a transmitting end or a receiving end; and is then managed as another service segment nonterminal at a transmitting end or a receiving end when leaving the equipment of an unknown manufacturer or the third-party operator network. Such a service exists as two or more service segments in a network management system, which makes network management very inconvenient. Furthermore, since service segments are not necessarily associated with each other, some of the service segments may be deleted by mistake during management, such that the whole service may be interrupted, which will cause great loss to a customer.
With virtual Network Element (NE) techniques, the problem encountered in passing through an equipment of an unknown manufacturer or a third-party operator network is solved. However, as an existing virtual network element in concept is essentially a virtual device, notable problems still exist in practical applications, as briefly introduced below with a specific example.
Shown in FIG. 1 is a scenario of multipoint-to-multipoint traverse in a Packet Transport Network (PTN), where a 10 Gibit/s Ethernet (GE) interface of a network element NE_A, and GE interfaces of network elements NE_B, NE_C and NE_D, are each configured with a service Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) and a service IP. If a virtual network element or an offline network element is used to simulate an IP network, in practical applications, for a static service, information on a next hop required to be configured may point to an incorrect next hop. For an example of a service from NE_A to NE_B, according to a configuration, a next hop of the service of NE_A should be NE_D; however if a virtual network element or an offline network element is used to simulate the IP network, the next hop of the service of NE_A will be a virtual network element instead of NE_D.
In general, existing virtual network element techniques are based on a virtual device, with the essence being to replace an equipment of a third-party manufacturer with a virtual network element managed as a black box, white box or grey box management approach, and have disadvantages as follows.
(1) With existing virtual network element techniques based on replacement of an equipment of a third-party manufacturer with a virtual network element, configuration corresponding to equipment resources has to be reflected.
(2) An existing virtual network element lacks any network feature, failing to meet a requirement of network configuration and management.
(3) An existing virtual network element, merely as a basic unit and a special case of a network, leads to a model difficult to be managed.